Every player of any quality ends up getting an NTC when they hit their UFA years and every contending team ends up with a pile of them as they try and extend their window. Look at teams like Chicago and Boston right now.
People who don't understand this are stuck in a Vancouver bubble and don't understand the league as a whole.
Have you noticed that every Pejorative Slured thing this fan base complains about is the exact same thing that our Pejorative Slured writers try to make controversy over?
- Luongo making 10M (didn't understand the cap)
- Giving out NTCs (standard for contending teams picking up UFAs and resigning players for cheap to have added depth)
- Getting no return for Schneider (highest return for a goaltender besides Varlamov in over a decade)
- Getting no return for Luongo (I think we sold really low on Luongo, but he was an aging goalie and I think it's a surprise to a lot of people how good he's been for Florida. We also got our current starter goalie, who gets too much hate given who he has on the blueline. We also got a player that is better than most of Benning's acquisition in Matthias who should have returned a 3rd at the deadline.)
- Luongo's terrible contract being the reason for the poor return (NHL approved the contract and then retroactively punished the Canucks for it in a new CBA, and didn't grandfather old contracts in. We got f***ed, and I think all 30 owners including Aquilini voted for it)
- Poor drafting (Inherited bottom 5 scouting staff in the league and was making big moves to overhaul it, had late position because of success and few picks because we were going all in)
- Can't make a trade (didn't have exceptionally low number of NHL trades compared to other GMs)
- Gillis wouldn't have been able to rebuild anyway because of all the NTCs he gave that we're now stuck with (Garrison, Kesler, Bieksa, Hamhuis, Burrows, Hansen traded, plus a number of NTCs we had were limited NTCs)
- This was really Nonis' team (as if contract extensions, UFA signings and trade pickups aren't important. It's surprising he was even able to keep that core intact under the cap, and even had to replace players like Ohlund and Mitchell)
These have all been things that I've heard Vancouver, and even national, sports personalities saying. I'm not even saying that all of them are completely wrong, Gillis was in no way perfect, but these things were so overblown that it was a huge controversy and just awful awful managing by Gillis.
Vancouver fans expected this team to be a cup contender every year and couldn't handle it ending. It ended in a pretty brutal way, admittedly, but our entire roster was having career low years. It seemed pretty clear that we would bounce back, but also clear that our window was tightly shut. Teams chant fire Gillis because they're angry and apparently don't understand that after 5 years of success the ride is going to end sometime. Aquilini is one of those fans and now we have what we have.
If Vancouver wasn't stuck with people like Macintyre things might be very different right now. If all of Vancouver sports media wasn't spewing this nonsense, do we really think Aquilini would have acted the same? The media shitting all over Gillis and pumping Benning's tires definitely played a hand in this situation. Even if some of the things I listed are inaccurate or misleading or even completely wrong, most of them aren't and these are the kind of things that Aquilini was no doubt hearing constantly. From 2008-2013 we were legitimately a top team in the NHL. Not just a bubble team but a legitimate contender.
The media in this city is responsible for all of this trash, there is no way that their misleading coverage didn't influence ownership. It was controversy after controversy that were all nothingburgers. The question is was it because they're idiots, or is it because Gillis hurt their feefees by not wanting to answer stupid questions. Well I guess that's both, actually. Many of the things listed aren't just from the Torts year or the SJ year, these were things that were constantly brought up in our peak years that were demonstrably untrue. The fact that the media convinced our fanbase that Luongo's contract being front-loaded is a bad thing is f***ing inexcusable. Either they're being disingenuous to stir controversy or they literally don't understand the sport they're covering.
Literal fake news broke this team.
